Bones and legends by the railway tracks
Given its location next to the high-speed tracks to Paris, the cemetery park around Old St Pancras Church is unexpectedly atmospheric. Pancras is said to have been martyred in Rome in the year 303. According to one tradition, a church dedicated to him stood here in late Roman times, which would make Old St Pancras London’s oldest Christian place of worship. Roman tiles were found in its walls, but they may have been taken from a military camp. A different story relates that holy relics of this saint were brought from Rome by the mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons in 597. A stone in the chancel has been tentatively dated to the early 7th century, but in its present form, the modest church is the result of restoration in Victorian times.
The cemetery next to the church evokes even more historical associations. Here lie the bones of the composer Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of the great Johann Sebastian, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author and advocate of women’s rights. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel »Frankenstein«, met her husband, the poet Shelley, in this cemetery, and they planned their elopement at the mother’s grave. The striking funeral monument designed by Sir John Soane for himself and his wife is said to have inspired the design of the K2 telephone box (see p. 100).
Perhaps the strangest sight at Old St Pancras is a 150-year-old ash, the »Hardy Tree«. Tombstones have been placed around its trunk like the spokes of a wheel. It commemorates people whose bones were disturbed and jumbled in the 1860s to make way for railway tracks and tunnels. The architect’s apprentice who had the task of moving the graves was the later novelist Thomas Hardy, whose poem »The Levelled Churchyard« contains these lines: We late-lamented, resting here, are mixed to human jam, and each to each exclaims in fear, »I know not which I am!«
Info
Address Pancras Road, NW1 1UL | Public Transport Mornington Crescent (Northern Line) | Hours Daily until dusk| Tip Via the rear (eastern) entrance to the cemetery and Camley Street you can quickly reach the Regent’s Canal, where a 30-minute walk westward leads to the market and food stalls at Camden Locks.
Back
To the online map